Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y7yvgy0w6o

by gorbachev • 3 months ago

526 371 3 months ago

gorbachev2• 3 months ago

Meta cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.

everdrive2• 3 months ago

Sounds about right. If you know someone who uses these smart glasses, it's important not to tolerate them whatsoever. Don't speak with them, interact with them. I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.

jofzar• 3 months ago

There's a name for these people, glassholes

arowthway4• 3 months ago

Also make sure to avoid people with smartphones and places with video surveilence.

elevation2• 3 months ago

I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.

Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones

Aaronstotle• 3 months ago

I want to get the Oakley Meta ones so I can record bike rides easier, should I not be tolerated?

paulddraper2• 3 months ago

Are GoPros acceptable?

I went to the beach, jet skiing. One of the guys had Meta glasses.

I liked the footage.

getnormality3• 3 months ago

Well, yeah. If I went straight to the press to trash the reputation of my client's product, rather than communicating internally first to help them proactively address the issues, I would expect to get fired.

Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.

EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work. I suspect that some of the reason people buy these products is for data capture, and that will sometimes lead to sensitive stuff being recorded. What should the rules be around this and who should decide? Personally I don't know.

OutOfHere3• 3 months ago

Proactively address the issues? Are you kidding me? This is not an issue that just happened to slip by; it is 100% by design. You're fooling no one.

giraffe_lady• 3 months ago

There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.

elphinstone• 3 months ago

What makes you think the outsourcing firm didn't raise these concerns in email or meetings? You think these people wanted to lose jobs and income? That's irrational.

Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?

ImPostingOnHN4• 3 months ago

You would help conceal a crime against the people just because it's good business??

Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.

ignoramous• 3 months ago

the content they were paid to classify

  A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out.

  Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects ...

SlinkyOnStairs5• 3 months ago

"Fun" bonus fact: This isn't the first time Sama (the outsourcing company) has had these problems.

OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.

cyanydeez• 3 months ago

Isn't it more that tech companies are just more high profile and integral to political and social landscape than older companies; but reviewing the current political zeitgeist, they're in lockstep to what some, if not all, would just call fascism?

prepend4• 3 months ago

How else do you want companies to remove and prevent CSAM? It seems like you must have some human involvement to train and monitor.

It’s a terrible job, I wouldn’t want to do it, but someone needs to. Perhaps one day, AI will be accurate enough to not need it, but even then you need someone to process complaints and waivers (like someone’s home photos being inaccurately flagged).

deaux4• 3 months ago

Sama (the outsourcing company)

If script writers gave the company this name in a fictionalization it would be rejected as too on the nose.

stackghost• 3 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg and disrespect for user privacy.

Name a more iconic duo.

Frieren• 3 months ago

Whistleblower protection is key for any working society. Only dictatorships and oligarchies protect criminals while shaming whistleblowers.

I do not care which country the outsourcing company is in. When criminals go global, protection whistleblowers should go global too.

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 months ago

Not sure which is worse here - that Meta are recording video from customers' smart glasses, or that they are firing people who talk about it.

OutOfHere3• 3 months ago

Everything having to do with Meta, starting with its very name, has been evil from the start.

frm882• 3 months ago

Did you know that after being an angel investor in facebook, Peter Thiel personally mentored Zuckerberg for couple of years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP7Z_Eqxhxk

embedding-shape2• 3 months ago

The latter, as they can't even claim to have done so by accident, or "it was just bug".

SV_BubbleTime• 3 months ago

Can I squeeze in the just a teeny tiny bit of… why the hell are you wearing an internet camera on you while naked and/or having sex?

… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.

embedding-shape2• 3 months ago

So already, this person wearing these glasses are already agree with that Meta can monitor them. They also probably trust Meta when they say "When the glasses are off, nothing is recording", for better or worse. So with that perspective in mind, it's not far fetched to assume these same people will willingly be naked into front of these recording devices they believe to be off.

Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.

sunaookami• 3 months ago

The Ray-Ban stays ON during sex!

Tangurena22• 3 months ago

There are "content creators" who intentionally record people without any sort of consent. At least when they point cameras, one can notice the cameras and take action. With these sorts of glasses, no one in view has consented, nor have they agreed to any sort of terms & conditions.

I never understood the appeal of upskirt pictures. But I think that taking videos of non-consenting participants/victims is the current version of the upskirt photo craze.

slumberlust• 3 months ago

Voyeurism

bookedkit• 3 months ago

wow, right call, this all feels wrong, and hardly anyone knows

orthecreedence• 3 months ago

Or maybe that people are wearing surveillance glasses while they fuck their partner? I know we need to push these companies to not be shitheads, but ultimately you can only be a shithead with the data people give to you (with the exception of things like Flock, who are shitheads with "public" surveillance data).

I know our culture is so supremely fucked at this point that wearing corporate surveillance goggles during intimate moments could somehow be normalized, but holy shit. How did people get so trusting?

senordevnyc• 3 months ago

People upload videos of themselves having sex for anyone to see. Some people just don’t care about privacy the way you do.

abustamam6• 3 months ago

well, this seems kinda like victim blaming, like when a bunch of celebrity phones got hacked and their nudes leaked to the public. Those were supposed to be for personal consumption/partners' eyes only, but they ended up on the web because some assholes decided the whole world was entitled to those photos. like, should those celebrities have uploaded their intimate photos the the cloud? probably not, but it doesn't mean that Google or Apple should be able to do whatever they want with those photos.

but i do agree that people just have become too trusting with our tech overlords, and its that trust that makes them continue to do shit like this over and over.

IAmBroom• 3 months ago

People make porn. You look down on them. News at 11.

letmetweakit• 3 months ago

Unfortunately this news will have no impact, neither on customer behavior, neither on policy, neither on Meta's behavior.

talkingtab• 3 months ago

Meta said the contracting "did not meet (meta's) standards". I am sure that is true. meta's "standard" is not to reveal the illegal, immoral, unethical things meta does. No matter what the harm.

Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.

[edit: add last two sentences]

prepend4• 3 months ago

Is it illegal or immoral? Having Meta review this material has to be approved by users and has their consent.

There was an example in the article where a user’s glasses kept recording the user’s wife after he took them off. That’s bad but on the user, not Facebook.

Seems similar to a situation where someone takes nudes of someone without their consent and then sends them off to a lab to be printed. The lab isn’t doing anything illegal or unethical printing them when they ask the user “are these legal” and the user replies “yes.” Unless you want to stop photo printers from ever printing nudes, I think the responsibility is on the user, not the firm.

msh2• 3 months ago

Is there explicit approval? Or is it buried in the legal agreements?

burnte• 3 months ago

Yeah, why the hell is Meta wa5tching people's videos either? Why PAY a company to invade our privacy and watch our videos? It's flipping BIZARRE.

stingraycharles3• 3 months ago

Isn’t that obvious from the article? They’re labeling content for training AIs, something which is happening all over the world constantly.

jaidhyani• 3 months ago

I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.

2ndorderthought8• 3 months ago

Yea but no. Meta is a defense contractor that hires out to 3rd parties exactly to do this. so you guys don't get to do that, but a lot of other people are. I hope that helped you sleep at night while you were there. But yea, it all gets bought and sold at the end of the day.

The irony is meta wants to implement verification to protect kids. Meanwhile it's doing everything it can to exploit them most at every single level for profit and for the love of the game. Billions of dollars, the world's most advanced computers all dedicated for it

rkagerer• 3 months ago

Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

If Facebook were designed with a different set of incentives that prioritized the user, fostered positive engagement, and better respected individual's privacy and data sovereignty - setting a better standard for the whole industry - I feel there wouldn't be all this fuss today about banning social media accounts.

causal• 3 months ago

The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.

malfist2• 3 months ago

These contractors were hired to view this data. Your defense of Meta here doesn't make sense. Meta fired them for speaking out about the data Meta collects, not because they saw the data they were hired to look at.

cozzyd• 3 months ago

Anecdotal of course, but I heard that this wasn't at all the case circa 2006 and that (then) FB employees would routinely read private messages and such. Obviously it wasn't a big company yet and probably didn't have those policies yet... (clearly the policies are there for a reason...)

advisedwang• 3 months ago

There's no allegation that these workers abused their access. The allegation is that their routine work reviewing footage included private content. The revelation is that USERS are using meta glasses non-consensually.

thunderfork• 3 months ago

As someone who worked for a contractor which had Meta as a client, I disagree.

All advertiser support agents were given super-read on all profiles & pages, and I never once observed a CSR being questioned on their use of this access in any way.

iJohnDoe2• 3 months ago

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225130

iJohnDoe2• 3 months ago

@jaidhyani I hate to burst your bubble, but there are major privacy violations here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226756

deaux4• 3 months ago

You're still on the koolaid, as many replies here accurately point out. Saying it's not because you're eager to defend them is lying to yourself, because you're smart enough to think of most of these replies yourself. Primarily the fact that these are contractors whose entire job is to watch smart glasses footage and the point your bringing up - even if we believe it at face value - is completely irrelevant to this post.

If you truly want to atone for your sins, you have a long way to go. I don't blame you for having worked there, I've worked at places that are only a little better than Meta (which is hard considering Meta is at the absolute bottom of the entire ladder, including Peter Thiel companies, thanks to Meta's sheer scale of carnage). But its time to completely come to terms with the reality, rather than stopping halfway to try and feel better about your resume.

keybored• 3 months ago

I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

When did FaceBook make the world not-worse?

red_admiral4• 3 months ago

Indeed, on this one point, Meta has higher standards than the NSA used to - Snowden mentioned that employees tracked their current wives/girlfriends so often it unofficially got the codename LOVEINT.

Same for "Meta reads your E2E whatsapp messages". Meta does many things, is probably massively net negative for civilisation, but it doesn't do that.

gorbachev2• 3 months ago

Except when Zuck decides it's profitable to violate the rules.

The man is without any redeeming qualities.

stingraycharles3• 3 months ago

Unfortunately in today’s world where organizations are larger than many a country’s GDP, they really only have to face responsibility towards shareholders and maximizing profits is the thing they usually care about.

deepsquirrelnet• 3 months ago

At the time of the publication, Meta admitted subcontracted workers might sometimes review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI.

They just got fired for "piercing the veil". They committed the sin of bringing attention to the invasion of privacy.

alistairSH2• 3 months ago

Were/are video recordings from the glasses advertised as being E2E encrypted?

Mostly, I'm just surprised that anybody would be naive enough to take a camera provided by Facebook into a sexual encounter and expect anything else.

throwpoaster5• 3 months ago

That's not what the Friedman Doctrine is, technically. It is that management should obey moral, ethical, and legal frameworks in the operation of the business for the benefit of its investors; and specifically NOT take actions which are outside of that narrow scope.

Avicebron2• 3 months ago

Does that include trying to influence moral, ethical, and legal frameworks to the benefit of the investors as well? Because if it does it is kind of a moot point.

theowsmnsn• 3 months ago

Meta is so evil

0x1ceb00da• 3 months ago

Evil is the current meta

I_am_tiberius2• 3 months ago

Not a fan of regulation in general, but would love to see a ban of cameras on glasses used in public spaces.

stronglikedan• 3 months ago

Why? What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice? Just that it's noticeable? I don't think that's a good enough reason for yet-more-regulation. You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities, and often by people standing right next to you unnoticed, so just act accordingly.

stfp• 3 months ago

Because they will be popular and lots of people will buy them and use them all the time, leading to much more generalized surveillance than the concealed options that only a tiny tiny fraction of people would buy or use (and that we should also regulate)

jnovek• 3 months ago

“You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities”

You are the frog being boiled.

Retr0id• 3 months ago

The problem is if it becomes socially normalized. If you're using a concealed camera and someone notices, you're a creep/asshole.

applfanboysbgon• 3 months ago

What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice?

The latter is literally illegal, at least in my country and I hope in any civilized country. If your point is that there's no difference between glasses and other forms of creep cams and the glasses should be illegal too, I concur!

intended14• 3 months ago

Yet more regulation? We have regulation for these glasses already?

Aren’t there countries that make it mandatory to blot out faces of people on videos if they didn’t consent?

schnitzelstoat• 3 months ago

If anything they should be banned in private spaces, like if someone wearing them enters someone's home etc.

There is no expectation of privacy in public.

ldoughty• 3 months ago

The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.

In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.

informancer• 3 months ago

While technically "there is no expectation of privacy in public space." I do see a categorical difference between creating a stored, AI processed record of random people and "people can see what you do while you're out and about". That argument was valid before the mass automation we see now, but now it is more a fig leaf than an argument.

I do not remember every single person I see on the street. What makes it Ok for some guy who will also forget me to create a stored, persistent, AI processed set of videos of me?

I do find the idea of a glasses version of an action cam quite cool, but we are talking about smart glasses from Meta here, which is a different thing.

We are talking about a network of streaming cameras moving around, filming.These videos are stored, still without any specifics about a purpose or when the data will be deleted.

Besides, the filmed people do not choose or consent to be filmed, they might not even be aware that they are filmed. This is not like a phone where you at least have a chance to see it. The person doing the filming chooses to film. Or they might not be aware they are still filming. They might also be one update away from always on. If Amazon did it with Alexa, Meta can do it with the glasses.

Of course, there are CCTV, but, at least in Europe, their use is very specific. You have to be informed about who to contact about the data, as well as the purpose of the recording and how long it will be stored. There too the scope is much more limited than a random guy filming people without their consent.

The collection is one problem. The usage is another. We know they are used to train AI for unspecified use, generative AI? Something else? Under the GDPR the purpose of the collection should be known, but in that context it is extremely murky.

Based on existing technology, it would be possible for them to use facial recognition on these videos to track individuals, building profiles as they go, including location. These profiles could even be linked to the identity of people who have been tagged in photos before. While it might be extremely difficult now, it might be possible later. Making it possible might even be what the AI training is about. The data exist, and it is unclear how long it will be kept, or whether the purpose of processing will change.

It would be bad enough if it was any company, but we are talking about Meta, a company that brought us the Cambridge analytica scandal. A company that knowingly let its users be scammed by ads for profit. Profit over ethics has been part of their DNA from the start, not an exception.

pxc• 3 months ago

The most important real use case of devices like this is as accessibility tech. Blind people everywhere are talking about devices like this.

It's the same with phones. I know blind people who have been harassed for holding their phones up to things as though they are taking pictures, but in fact they're using the camera on their phone to render signage legible to them, or having their phone (or a person on the other end) read it.

Banning this in a way that doesn't in practice cause problems for visually impaired people would be difficult. It might also be difficult to do in a way that doesn't harm, for instance, accountability for cops who are acting in public.

The impulse to "ban" is sometimes a bit naive imo.

rickdg• 3 months ago

This is what happens when you buy a camera from the "they trust me, dumb fucks" guy and put it on your face.

aeve890• 3 months ago

But aren't the users wearing glasses while nude or having sex dumb fucks though?

wolvoleo3• 3 months ago

I can imagine there's a use case for these glasses during sex. It would make for pretty exciting footage :)

These users probably didn't know where it would end up.

f311a• 3 months ago

Why do they even need workers to classify naked content? They could filter some content prior to passing it to workers. They already have models to moderate explicit content.

sheepcow• 3 months ago

If you want to read more about how unsavory aspects of AI-training are off-loaded onto poor workers in third-world countries, would recommend Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". These workers are paid pennies an hour for unstable jobs that expose them to some horrific material.

intended14• 3 months ago

Which examples did they cover in the book?

redbell• 3 months ago

"We see everything - from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker reportedly said.
Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.

Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.

chneu• 3 months ago

How is this weird? People have been trading away their privacy for the smallest possible gains in convenience for a long time.

moritzwarhier2• 3 months ago

Are you conflating telemetry with literally live-streaming your life to Meta? Because that's what makes the statement weird.

edit 2: OK, I see what you mean. But I'm wondering if it should be possible to consent to this via T&C. Basically the same issue as with many online services, turned up to 11, sure. And it involves OTHER people, who have not consented.

Stuff like this used to be outrage fuel even when it was more of a social experiment, e.g. the documentary "We live in public" or the "Big brother" TV show. By now, I'm sure there have been millions of influencers doing similar things, but it's very much not considered normal?

Streaming to an unknown number of employees might be considered different from streaming to the public, sure.

But the core question here is whether there's informed consent, and, IMO also, if it should be possible to consent to this when the other party is a company like Meta and the pretext is not deliberately seeking attention (like influencers and streamers do).

edit, clarified social media comparison

ryandrake2• 3 months ago

> Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.

It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?

finghin• 3 months ago

With lawyers like these, …

2ndorderthought8• 3 months ago

Well you gotta give out black mail material to the scam centers somehow. Otherwise they don't actually have leverage! Oh right... We don't want that happening.

intended14• 3 months ago

I’ve worked in trust and safety - for me this is stupid, but well below the threshold of impossible.

Hell, I know of a major firm that decided QA was not needed for their trust and safety process.

Another common issue will be SEA Arabic speakers tasked with labelling Middle Eastern Arabic content, because accents and cultural dialects are not a thing.

I’ve had people at FAANG firms cry on my shoulder, because they couldn’t get access to engineering resources at their own firms.

There was the famous case of meta executives overriding T&S policy and telling them that what content was news worthy during the Boston bombing. On a separate incident, they told their team that cartel violence was not newsworthy when friends in London complained about it.

When you say this is fantasy, what do you mean precisely?

DuncanCoffee• 3 months ago

I once read the manual of one of those small floor cleaning robots (Ecovacs Deebot U2 pro), and it basically said that by using it you were giving them a right to take pictures and send them to a remote server (to analyze issues or something like that)

2ndorderthought8• 3 months ago

Meta is a defense contractor. They see the world a little differently from everyone else.

dotancohen• 3 months ago

  > Am I reading this correctly?!

What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service. I still get strange responses when I tell people that I don't use WhatsApp. All Meta's properties are tainted such that I won't use them.

falcor84• 3 months ago

What you should have read correctly was the Facebook terms of service.

I'm reminded of Bo Burnham's wonderful "That Funny Feeling" from 2021's "Inside", where one of the absurd examples he offers in the lyrics is:

  There it is again, that funny feeling
  That funny feeling
  Reading Pornhub's terms of service ...

pfortuny3• 3 months ago

Tagging, tagging, tagging. That is what "improving...": teaching its LLMs and diffusion models.

dickeeT• 3 months ago

i don't think smart glasses itself is a good idea

jmyeet• 3 months ago

So I've never had a smart speaker in my house (Alexa, Apple, Google). I've just never been comfortable with the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Not because I thought these companies would deliberately start listening and recording in my house but because they will likely be careless with that data and it'll open the door for law enforcement to request it. Consider the Google Wi-fi scraping case from STreetView.

Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.

So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.

xerox13ster• 3 months ago

That is to say nothing of the new technological use cases that could develop from the already existing technology. They just haven’t been thought of developed yet.

Things like audio scanning your living space using those Alexa smart speakers with ultrasonics to get an image of not only everything in your space, but where you are in that space as well.

That technological use case only came out within the last five or so years, maybe closer to eight. Either way I could see that coming before it became a thing just because ultrasound imaging of your unborn child is a thing ultrasound imaging of the sea floor is a thing so why wouldn’t ultrasound imaging of your living space be a thing by a company who wants to know what you buy.

I never ever ever had Alexa I only ever had a Google home because I got it for free with GPM but I almost never used it because I hated the idea of it always listening.

I already regret Wi-Fi because they figured out now how to look through walls with that.

intended14• 3 months ago

You were wise enough to avoid this, unfortunately for most people “shiny tech!”.

touwer• 3 months ago

Bigtech and the race to the bottom of the ethical pitt. We can still go lowerrrr!

reliablereason2• 3 months ago

I wonder under what circumstances footage from the glasses are uploaded for classification.

Probably this is people asking the glasses something about what they see and the glasses uploading video for classification to generate an answer.

People think it is "just AI" so are not very concerned about privacy.

pfortuny3• 3 months ago

Always by default I assume.

reliablereason2• 3 months ago

Unlikely. That would be extremely expensive in bandwidth, storage and compute. Deciding to build the product like that would be an engineering decision that i would fire someone for.

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

One of the bigger commercial niches for smart glasses is filming POV porn, so it is hardly surprising that sort of content ended up in the moderation queue. The project should have planned to account for that use case.

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

And I do appreciate how awkward it is for Meta to admit that use case exists. Even in the Oculus Go days there were a bunch of polite euphemisms internally to avoid mentioning "our device has to ship with a browser so people can watch porn on it"

hosteur• 3 months ago

Why is there even a “ moderation queue”? Isn’t this people’s private recordings?

dylan604• 3 months ago

This is my question too. I get moderating things that people are posting. Being not familiar with the device and how it works, I'd assume that all footage is posted to the user's cloud account even if not publicly posted. This being cloud storage, Meta is "moderating" the footage to ensure CSAM or other restricted footage type is not being stored on their (Meta's) platform. That's my very generous take on it, not that I believe it

intended14• 3 months ago

I’m betting this is going to some ML / Data labelling pipeline.

inerte• 3 months ago

Yes but also we don't want people live streaming murder and suicide, so there's detection and moderation in place.

ozozozd• 3 months ago

How do you moderate what people do? You send someone to stop them from having sex because it was streamed to your servers?

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

The key phrase from the article is "review content filmed on its smart glasses when people shared it with Meta AI". I take that to mean the user took some action to actively share the footage with Meta (although knowing Meta, that could also mean they just didn't opt out)

mproud• 3 months ago

https://archive.ph/ubWba

bluedino• 3 months ago

What does "in row" mean? For us non-English English speakers.

jacobtomlinson• 3 months ago

"row" means "an argument"

jakecraige• 3 months ago

Yeah, I think it's more of a British English thing. It can also mean things like "in a fight". Like: "those two guys had a big row outside the pub the other night"

oa335• 3 months ago

in an argument

bobthepanda• 3 months ago

A row in this context is like a dispute or argument

prewett• 3 months ago

It's also pronounced r-ow (ow, as in I hurt myself) in this context, instead of r-oh, in case that helps the OP

e28eta• 3 months ago

“a noisy argument or fight”, from the Cambridge dictionary. I believe it’s primarily used in British English.

danparsonson2• 3 months ago

To add to the other replies, when it's an argument, it's pronounced like "how" not like "no".

jjk1662• 3 months ago

Hence "rowdy"

SoftTalker4• 3 months ago

"in a row"; the headline eliminated the "a" which contributes to the possible confusion.

jmull• 3 months ago

I believe the tricky privacy and security issues around smart glasses (and other "personal" tech) can be navigated successfully enough by a thoughtful, diligent, responsive company.

Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.

Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.

malshe• 3 months ago

A question for the HN folks who work for Meta - Is the pay so good that it makes it worth working for such a morally bankrupt organization?

allthetime• 3 months ago

There are countless large, high paying, morally bankrupt companies out there. It’s no mystery that people continue to work for them.

jmye2• 3 months ago

I think it's the excitement because it's a morally bankrupt organization. Some people really get off on knowing that the sum total of everything they do professionally is bent around making kids depressed to the point of suicide, and angry to the point of shooting up their school.

I assume that every single person who still works at Meta has done that personal calculus and decided that they fall on the "this is fucking amazing, important work" side.

bradlys• 3 months ago

I’d like to know the well paying and non-morally bankrupt companies. What company out there has a flawless reputation and is paying $400k/yr for senior eng in SV?

cosmicgadget3• 3 months ago

There certainly is no middle ground between morally bankrupt and flawless!

hirvi74• 3 months ago

Good. Anyone who works for such a company is immoral in my opinion.

prepend4• 3 months ago

I think Meta, like all companies, doesn’t want its subcontractors creating bad press for them.

So it doesn’t surprise me that Meta didnt renew/cancelled a contract that is a net negative for them. Arguing over the reason seems fruitless as no reason is needed per the terms of the contract (I assume since breach of contract wasn’t brought up by the sub).

m-p-3• 3 months ago

Absolutely no way I'd buy anything from Meta that has a camera built-in.

tamimio• 3 months ago

and was a common practice among other companies.

Meta isn’t lying, you should assume other companies are doing it too, Tesla did it with their cameras, and assume others like any company has access to your camera, I would even assume CCTV cameras too. It’s why for anything sensitive, try to use open source stacks, you might lose some of the features, but it’s a needed compromise.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

Facebook may have to rename itself into NaughtyBook or SpyBook or Pr0nBook. They really want people to help them spy on other people here - including their sex life. Expect new sexy videos in 3 ... 2 ...

mxfh• 3 months ago

Meta ended its contract with Sama

At this scale, this sound like some insider joke contract made up only to make some hustle on the side capitalizing with stock options on the possibility of adhoc news trading bots glitching out on the keyword, here "x.com/sama" signals.

fortran77• 3 months ago

People have sex with their glasses on?

kylehotchkiss• 3 months ago

Are their partners even consenting to glasses with cameras??

wolvoleo3• 3 months ago

Well they would be right up in your face in some positions, I can't imagine they don't know.

And people do record porn for personal viewing. They probably didn't know it was being viewed by meta employees as well.

krupan• 3 months ago

I'm guessing at least some of these cases are where the glasses are sitting on a nightstand and still recording

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

Oops! Oh, too late. And another nail in the heart of smart glasses…

ghm21802• 3 months ago

About the "they asked us to view it and then fired us for it". Having worked in their RL division(I don't work at meta anymore) this story is quite weird for two reasons:

1. Meta AFAIR paid/compensated people — contractors or recruited via ads — to have them submit their data. There are strict privacy protocol and reviews in place to distinguish data use in these cases vs gen public. This is not to say the process is perfect, but if these users are gen public, I would be very shocked.

2. Hiring contractors to submit data is a more controlled environment VS recruitment of gen pub via ads to submit data, but the former has more well understood privacy disclosures than the latter. This means in practice asking contractors to wear glasses and "move around their surroundings naturally and do things" goes well with basically the privacy practice "the data your are submitting we can view and use all of it for purpose X and nothing but X". BUT this framing is with ad based recruited people — which are general users who willingly submit data — is much much harder. My suspicion is they are running ad based recruiting in general public and while those users may have signed a privacy statement it is very surprising that they did not tighten the privacy practices around the use of the data and who has access.

jdiff4• 3 months ago

You seem to misunderstand the situation. These contractors were reviewing sensitive customer data, not collecting data of their own.

ghm21802• 3 months ago

The contractors in the report are separate from the incentivized people or contractors typically used to collect data.

cwillu• 3 months ago

Meta's glasses have a light in the corner of the frames that is turned on when the built-in camera is recording.

Because nobody knows how to put a dot of nail polish on an led they don't want seen, right?

loeg• 3 months ago

There is some detection for obstructing the LED. It's a little more clever than you assume.

KaiserPro3• 3 months ago

Ex Meta employee here (yes you are right to boo):

The thing that really gets me is that internally there are 4 levels of data 1 being public domain shit (the sky is blue) up to 4 which is private user data, or something that is sensitive if leaked or shared.

I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.

The part where I worked, in visual research, we had to jump through a years worth of legal hoops to get permission to record videos in public. We had to build an anonymisation pipeline, bullet proof audit trail, delete as much data as possible, with auto delete if something went wrong.

We had rigid rule about where that data could be stored and _who_ could access it. We were not allowed to share "wild" footage (ie data that might have the hint of anyone who hadn't signed a contract) for annotation because it would be given to a third party. THe public datasets we released all had traceable people, locations all with legal waivers signed.

Then I hear they just started fucking hosing private data to annotators to _train_ on? without any fucking basic controls at all? Just shows that whenever Zuck or monetsization want something, the rules don't apply.

I look forward to that entire industry collapsing in on it's self.

theplatman• 3 months ago

have always wondered about this especially post Cambridge Analytica where Meta imposed really stringent requirements for API use even for personal things while it was blatantly obvious that internally it was a different story

KaiserPro3• 3 months ago

But thats the thing internally it wasn't. The user dat controls were really quite good.

Its not a mistake that this data got into contractor hands, it was a decision that took lots of time, numerous legal reviews and signoff from Zuck himself.

dntrkv• 3 months ago

I was told that by default all user data is level 4, as in if you do anything without decent approval, you're insta fired. There are many stories about at least one person a month during boot camp accessing user data and getting escorted out of the building within hours.

Given the size and nature of Meta's business, I would assume they would have better systems in place. SWEs should only have access to PII with explicit consent from users/customers e.g. support tickets.

Especially someone going through boot camp. Do they have access to de-anonymized user data during training?

Shit, at my last company I had to jump through so many hoops to access user data even with consent from the customer.

donkey-hotei• 3 months ago

This is bogus. Meta doesn't have bootcampers escorted out of the building for accessing PII all the time. PII is locked down behind ACLs which are not auto-granted for just anyone asking.

KaiserPro3• 3 months ago

I would assume they would have better systems in place.

They did when I was there. every time you got close to user data an "interstitial" would pop up asking you for a ticket number and justification. There were a bunch of tools that ran searching for people accessing user data.

For example in boot camp you'd create a page that pulled your profile details. this was to introduce the idea of "ents" (the API that manages the social graph) and mercurial. You could, if you wanted to then traverse your friend graph. as soon as you did that, it'd trigger one the automated rules and your account would be suspended and you'd be yeeted within hours.

The point was, if you were doing something legitimate it was fine, but if you stepped out of line, the automated systems would find out and fire you on the stop.

also as everything is done through remote dev boxes, _everything_ is recorded (along with all the files on your laptop, and the regular screenshots, plus all the browser history and keystrokes) Data exfiltraition is super hard, hence why there are hardly any "angry nerd extorts girl" type stories. Its not because meta isn't full of angry nerds, it because its really really difficult to get at user data without getting caught.

aklemm• 3 months ago

I bet the victims had their socks on too

yaur• 3 months ago

It seems the issue is not the glasses users, but the people that the glasses users were having sex with. Did meta get their consent before redistributing this content?

mmanfrin• 3 months ago

I got a paywall, first time I've seen that on BBC.

swyx• 3 months ago

this may be the greatest title i've seen on hacker news in a decade

sidcool• 3 months ago

Why would anyone trust Meta with their personal data! After a while it's just natural selection.

rufasterisco• 3 months ago

It would be refreshing for once to see the top comment to such articles to be

“Yes, we all know it, and we keep those app installed regardless“.

game_the0ry• 3 months ago

Can we boycott meta yet? I am sick of this company.

jimmyjazz14• 3 months ago

It still blows my mind that anyone would volunteer to don these smart glasses, it's almost like some alien mindset to me.

lbrito• 3 months ago

Its a reverse They Live!

cosmicgadget3• 3 months ago

Eh, it is the same mindset as the Elon fanboys who constantly rave about Full Self Driving (Supervised). Plenty of that around here.

And the five or six HNers that bought the Apple goggles.

dhosek• 3 months ago

This headline reminds me that “row” is one of these words I’ve been mispronouncing almost my whole life (I just learned the correct pronunciation this year). In this context row rhymes with cow,¹ now dough.

⸻

1. The first rhyme that came to mind was bow, but I realized there was a problem with that example.

booleandilemma• 3 months ago

That's amazing. I've also been mispronouncing it incorrectly my entire life. Thanks for this info! I'm a native English speaker and my language continues to surprise me.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/row#dictionary-en...

jjk1662• 3 months ago

Row as in rowdy

hodgesrm• 3 months ago

It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."

i2shar• 3 months ago

You will appreciate: https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4

exabrial• 3 months ago

who on earth is buying these things and why

MarchApril• 3 months ago

I don't even trust the webcam electrical shutter of my laptop to the point I ran tape over it. Why people trust tech giants with their private data so much? What do they think of when they hear "private data"? Like trivial things such as their names, their mother's maiden names, what they ate this morning, posts they saw on Facebook? Because that have to be the case when I see someone flushing with an app on their phone and yells "Siri, play a seductive song to get me and my wife Julie in the mood? Turn it off after 10 minutes. Also don't record us during our hot love making!".

Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs

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